Hi all,
A while back I got myself an Atari 520ST+ (Factory fitted with 1MB). My reasoning was:
1) It's retro.
2) I was always a big XL/XE fan, so another Atari can only be good.
3) It supposedly has great sound.
4) I didn't know much about the hardware and was eager to find out more.
5) It supposedly has a few things in common with the CPC.
I even got myself an external drive, converted the ST to S-Video with one of my S-Video PCBs and added a 3.5mm stereo audio output. Unfortunately I'm rather under-whelmed by the whole thing. The GUI is crap with hideous eye-cancer-inducing colours, any games I've tried out were mediocre to bad (definitely nowhere near the Amiga) and the sound didn't exactly blow my socks off.
Am I missing something? Is there some killer-app that will completely change my mind? Or should I ask Gryzor to move this thread to the Classified section so that I can pass it on to someone with a better opinion of this machine? At this stage it has already broke the record for the fastest computer to make it onto my "Just taking up space" list.
Bryce.
I have been having exactly the same feelings towards my STe.
I added 4meg of memory and a Satandisk to it and just cant seem get any pleasure out of toying with it.
I struggle to understand how back in the day anyone could have considered buying one of these things when they could have had an Amiga - or even a hoop & stick.
Quote from: Bryce on 13:00, 22 November 13
Am I missing something?
The ST is the closest 16-bit cousin to the CPC. I wouldn't say it has amazing graphics or sound and the Amiga is generally a much more capable machine, but this is mainly due to custom chips.
Try this demo: Atari ST Froggies over the Fence : scans, dump, download, screenshots, ads, (http://www.atarimania.com/demo-atari-st-froggies-over-the-fence_s16304.html)
If a single Demo is all the ST has to offer, then consider my ST+ to be up for sale. Anyone interested in it should send me a PM. I can post pictures too if required.
Bryce.
What about the load beep the keyboard makes under Gem or GFA Basic??? ;)
There are some nice ST games (no second prize, vroom! and a few others).
There are quite a few nice demos.
The overscan demos are a coding accomplishment because to do this on the st, especially the side borders, you have to open every line (same as c64 I suppose).
It's one of those things, some people love em, some people don't.
Have one, rarely used either. Supposed to have been excellent "back in the day" if you were into MIDI stuff.
Too many projects/machines/cars and not enough time.....
The Atari ST has a few good games, that is if you are into adventures, rpgs and vector graphics. Granted, most (or all) of them were released for the Amiga and the PC as well, but the Atari ST did not have a problem with flickering (Amiga) and was better graphics- and speedwise than the PCs of that time (if you did not have the money for an EGA card). With the monochrome monitor it was better suited for "serious" applications, and especially because of the MIDI port, many musicians bought an ST.
Games:
Dungeon Master (and later version)
Space Quest I-III
King's Quest I-IV
Ultima II-VI
Purple Saturn Day
Starglider I / II
the Magnetic Scrolls adventures
I wouldn't want one now, but as a 16-bitter in the 80s it was a good choice for a couple of years after it was released.
And the only real problems of the ST according to complaints of magazines of that time were the keyboard and the buggy GFA Basic.
Well my main reason for getting it was to understand the hardware... Done.
I added the S-Video out, so it is in full colour, ready for games. I was going to make an adapter to connect my HxC to it, but after trying some games from real disks I kind of got dis-interested.
I'll try some more games, but I think I'll sell it anyway. Adventures and rpgs aren't my thing, and it definitely doesn't have any "wow features" that would make me want to keep it aswell as my Amigas.
Bryce.
ST has RGB out, why bother with the S-Video ?
A lot of people used custom GEM bootdiscs that changed the green to a much nicer colour.
The ST was very CPC like in that it put a lot of work onto the CPU rather than having custom chips. Later STs did include a blitter however.
The audio was only "amazing" if you used MIDI. This feature was way overblown everywhere of course, but because it was built in...
It's okay for 3D games versus the Amiga - it has a slightly faster CPU and a lot of 3D games were purely CPU rendered.
Sorry to hear you're not enjoying your ST+. I have to admit the Amiga is probably the better of the 2 machines and most games that appeared on both machines were better on the Amiga, and GEM is pretty nasty to look at :laugh:
What games have you tried?
As mentioned the flight sims were better on the ST in general compared to a bog standard Amiga.
Oids is a very good thrust clone and I think an Atari exclusive.
I love Supersprint, Rick Dangerous 1 and 2 on it.
Xenon 1 was possibly better on the ST than the Amiga but Xenon 2 is also very good.
Then there's
Midwinter
Time Bandit
No Second Prize
Lethal Excess..
It's also nice playing games like Supercars at a decent speed compared to the CPC :D
Quote from: MaV on 15:11, 22 November 13
the Atari ST did not have a problem with flickering (Amiga)
What? The Amiga only flickered if you used an interlaced mode. Almost nobody did because it flickered.
Quote from: ralferoo on 19:22, 22 November 13What? The Amiga only flickered if you used an interlaced mode. Almost nobody did because it flickered.
Yes, we know that.
But in the 80s it was this message that the magazines hammered into people's heads. Plus the superiority of the ST's monitors for "professional" use.
Having read through my previous post, I realised that I should have mentioned the fact that I was thinking about how we perceived the ST back then.
Quote from: MaV on 19:28, 22 November 13
But in the 80s it was this message that the magazines hammered into people's heads. Plus the superiority of the ST's monitors for "professional" use.
I dont remember reading anything like that in mags about flickering. Would they have been ST magazines you were reading then? ;)
Quote from: The Last Bandit on 15:37, 22 November 13
ST has RGB out, why bother with the S-Video ?
I have my Retro computers connected to PC LCD screens via an S-Video to VGA converter, so S-Video is more useful for me and more or less the same quality as RGB.
Bryce.
Ah right, easy of use setup.
I've got the it other way, everything is RGB'd if possible. My old Grundig doesn't like NTSC and a lot of my consoles US/JPN - refusing to make the jump to LCD for as long as possible :D
I was an ST user and fan back in the day, but I have to admit that the Amiga was the better computer of the two.
HOWEVER:
-as to the question of "why buy an Atari when there was the Amiga around", price is a prime factor of course (until the Amiga price went down. And even then a 1040 was, IIRC, considerably cheaper than an expander A500). Heck, my neighbor, a couple of years older than me, actually had a laser printer (laser!? WTF?) on which I used to print my assignments. As an all-purpose machine it was unbeatable for the price.
-the Amiga was held back because of ST ports, like the CPC with the ZX (only less so). This means that in many, many, many cases the games on the ST are just as good as the Amiga equivalents.
-early ST games are nothing to write home about nowadays but there are numerous titles that are very worthwhile and fun. I should know - I recently went through 85% of them testing my MiST FPGA. So I'd say you probably didn't find the right titles.
-The early TOS is slow as hell and a pain to watch. Upgrade it and things will become much better (though I don't think anyone had complained about the colour choice back then - maybe your saturation is way high?) Since you have an HxC you can connect to it you could also install something like Terradesk, NVDI and the likes, and it'll be a charm to work with. I can send you some HDD images if you'd like.
The ST was never something really unique or fantastic by itself - but then again noone ever said it was. It was just a fantastically affordable step into the 16-bit era (and without it the Amiga would probably have stayed much more expensive). But it's not to be discounted so easily...
IIRC the Atari ST has a disc format, which can actually conserve data - in contrast to the Amiga. :o
Really? Was data loss an issue for Amiga?
It was and especially is. Others can confirm that for sure. The Amiga used a format which overdid it with 3.5" discs, so after a couple of weeks the discs usually got errors. The format writes data too dense.
Quote from: Bryce on 13:00, 22 November 13The GUI is crap with hideous eye-cancer-inducing colours,
Are you sure it's not an Amiga? ;)
Seriously, the GUI is pretty good for 1985. The colour palette is user configurable, I guess you didn't get the language disk with you ST so you don't have the control panel. I had an Amiga 500 for a brief period but switched back to an ST as the Amiga was unusable for "serious" (I could only afford one computer at that time, and I used it a lot for schoolwork) use unless you could afford a couple of external floppydrives or a harddrive. Multitasking on the Amiga was IMO just a gimmick when all you could afford was a 512Kb single-floppy A500.
The sound is not remarkable. After all, it's just an YM. The STE is more capable with it's stereo DMA PCM-sound. But the YM can produce some pretty cool sounds, just listen to some of ultrasyd's productions (like Ultrasyd - The Final Bitchslap (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M62PR54k8VY#ws)).
Games are usually not as good as on the Amiga, although the difference is often small. But if you play games that really exploits the Amiga's hardware you'll notice the difference, the Amiga has way more powerful video hardware.
Doing "serious" stuff was much more comfortable on the ST than on the Amiga. As others has mentioned, you could be pretty sure that when you saved something it would load again the next day. It used FAT12 on the floppies, so exchanging data with the PC's at school was easy. Display quality was superior with the monochrome monitor. The ST also booted a lot faster, and a 1040STFM was - atleast here in Norway - considerably cheaper than a 512Kb A500.
The Amiga's hardware was better (well, most of it) but you got a cheaper and more usable computer if you bought an ST. And like today, the owners were a lot more friendly :)
Quote from: TFM on 19:59, 24 November 13
It was and especially is. Others can confirm that for sure. The Amiga used a format which overdid it with 3.5" discs, so after a couple of weeks the discs usually got errors. The format writes data too dense.
This is utter nonsense. The data density on an Amiga formatted disc is exactly the same as an IBM or ST or any other 3.5" SD floppy.
The only reason the Amiga format was able to hold 11 sectors per track over the 9 sectors per track of the IBM / ST is because it wrote track-at-once instead of having wasteful gaps between sectors to allow sector-at-once writing.
Lots of people experienced errors using HD discs in SD drives, this was true whatever system you used.
Quote from: Axelay on 04:22, 23 November 13I dont remember reading anything like that in mags about flickering. Would they have been ST magazines you were reading then? ;)
Those were german magazines, english ones were much too expensive if you could grab hold of them at all.
We were often reminded of the flickering modes that you had to "endure" when working with the Amiga. So consequently serious work was out of the question, buy a PC or ST for that.
I'm pretty sure that in the end the problem with the Amiga format boils down to cheap noname DD 3.5" disks which would have had the same errors on other computers as well.
Of course, as ralferoo mentions, quite a few also tried to use cheap noname HD disks on the Amiga.
Quote from: TFM on 19:59, 24 November 13
It was and especially is. Others can confirm that for sure. The Amiga used a format which overdid it with 3.5" discs, so after a couple of weeks the discs usually got errors. The format writes data too dense.
I never had that problem with my Amigas. Nobody else I knew had that problem either. I've never seen this issue ever talked about before, and I've been on Amiga forums since the 90s. I think this is another myth generated in the ST vs Amiga "wars" tbh.
Quote from: MaV on 02:09, 25 November 13
Those were german magazines, english ones were much too expensive if you could grab hold of them at all.
We were often reminded of the flickering modes that you had to "endure" when working with the Amiga. So consequently serious work was out of the question, buy a PC or ST for that.
Well, the flickering only occurred in interlace modes, such as 640x512. But the Amiga chipset (the original one anyway, not the enhancements that followed) didn't have the flexibility to program its own modes due to fixed vertical and horizontal frequencies. Hence you got high resolution monitors such as the A2024 - 1024x1024 from a PAL signal, but only at 10-15Hz image update frequency (the monitor still scanned at 60Hz).
The Atari ST's monochrome monitor (SM124) synced at a higher rate to gets its 640x400 72Hz black and white image. So this was a good way, if you had the monitor, to get a stable higher resolution image with no flickering. Most people used the ST or the Amiga on a TV however, and probably had a lower quality high resolution image than a CPC owner on a green screen.
Quote from: TFM on 19:59, 24 November 13
It was and especially is. Others can confirm that for sure. The Amiga used a format which overdid it with 3.5" discs, so after a couple of weeks the discs usually got errors. The format writes data too dense.
?? Never heard of this either. I have hundreds of Amiga disks, both self-written and commercial and I don't think I've ever had one fail on me.
Bryce.
Quote from: TFM on 19:59, 24 November 13
It was and especially is. Others can confirm that for sure. The Amiga used a format which overdid it with 3.5" discs, so after a couple of weeks the discs usually got errors. The format writes data too dense.
The bit density of the format is the same as on the ST.
It did have more sectors per track, and the structure of the headers was different compared to ST. Perhaps that was the issue?
The problem was cheap discs, especially HD ones with stickers over the holes to make them DD.
Quote from: arnoldemu on 10:47, 25 November 13The problem was cheap discs, especially HD ones with stickers over the holes to make them DD.
Me and my friends bought disks in bulk so we all used the same disks. The Amiga-owners (myself included when I had one) were the only ones to experience problems. "Not a DOS disk", "Disk not validated" or garbled data. Quite often the disk could be repaired ("disk validation?" It's been a long time!) but it took literally hours. Regular backups were much more efficient.
Quote from: MaV on 02:09, 25 November 13We were often reminded of the flickering modes that you had to "endure" when working with the Amiga. So consequently serious work was out of the question, buy a PC or ST for that.
I have experience from both and I can assure you that you didn't want to do any word processing on an Amiga in interlaced modes. Headache guaranteed. In non-interlaced modes it was just like the ST in colour modes, no flickering but less usable screenmodes. 200-250 lines doesn't cut it when working with a WYSIWYG wordprocessor or DTP package. I always preferred the monochrome (and cheap!) SM124 on my ST. I even used it when programming demos and (simple) games, I had both the SM124 and my colour TV connected via a switch-box, so I only used the TV when playing games or testing stuff I'd coded.
The Ark of Captain Blood was developped and released at first on Atari. So to try the real thing, you have to use an ST.
If i remember well the version is a bit superior on a few aspects.
I had a friend that had one, i remember playing Kick Off, Bubble Bobble, Cruise for a Corpse...
Quote from: remax on 15:18, 25 November 13
The Ark of Captain Blood was developped and released at first on Atari. So to try the real thing, you have to use an ST.
Ha! And therefore the CPC version is very well too, because..... it's not a damn speccy port. :P
Stunt Car Racer is also one of those games that are better on the ST than the Amiga. It's also one of the first popular games that allowed multiplayer gaming via a nullmodem cable. Highly recommended.
No Second Price is also a favourite, Super Sprint is great, Magic Pockets too. And Rick Dangerous of course, which is great on every platform I've tried it on. I also liked Zool on the STE. I have never tried it on the ST. Oids was fun, and Midi Maze fantastic if you had a friend (or 31) with ST and a midi-cable. Vroom was a good racing game. And don't forget Nebulus!
I think the ST was (/is) viewed as the underdog but in my book that just makes it all the more satisfying and intriguing when the most is squeezed out of it (much like the CPC).
Take the YM for example - in my view it sounds sweet and that's because it's a "real" soundchip. The Amiga just played a bunch of samples, which is no different to today's music. But through clever programming and musical ability, the ST sounds unique. There's a reason chip music fanboys love it so much :)
Quote from: redbox on 21:08, 25 November 13
Take the YM for example - in my view it sounds sweet and that's because it's a "real" soundchip. The Amiga just played a bunch of samples, which is no different to today's music. But through clever programming and musical ability, the ST sounds unique. There's a reason chip music fanboys love it so much :)
The flipside is that the soundchip in the ST was already retro when the ST came out... ;)
Quote from: ralferoo on 21:18, 25 November 13The flipside is that the soundchip in the ST was already retro when the ST came out... ;)
It looks like the Atari engineers didn't pick the YM because of it's audio qualities, but because it was a cheap and easy way to drive the printerport :) Atari wanted to create a "professional" computer for the masses and didn't really care about gaming. And it shows.
I like the YM. It's even better on the STE, where you can combine it with DMA PCM stereo sound. But there's no question about it, Paula is a much more capable soundchip.
It was most likely a cost compromise. The YM was dirt cheap at the time compared to higher end ICs.
Bryce.
Wow, that Ultrasyd track several posts back is awesome!
Why is STunt (heh, a typo but I'm leaving it in :D ) Car Racer better on the ST? Speed, probably, like with most vector games?
Quote from: Gryzor on 19:30, 28 November 13Speed, probably, like with most vector games?
Yes, it was a little bit faster and more responsive on the ST. You always won when you played against an Amiga :D
Heh, me and a friend similarly found Bomber to be much easier on his Amiga than on my 1040...
QuoteThe Ark of Captain Blood was developped and released at first on Atari. So to try the real thing, you have to use an ST.
yeah, Philip Ulrich the creator (ERE informatique the EXXOS the CRYO, did Dune too), came to computers from music,
he started on Speccy (yeah I know) then went into Atari ST. because he was first an electronic musician.
Philippe Ulrich - Wikipédia (http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippe_Ulrich)
He was one of the rare to prefer ST over Amiga.
Be cause he like MIDI and professional interface and mega RAM...
J-M Jarre did the music on captainBlood's Ark because they were friend (french electronic music pionneers and Atari ST fans)
QuoteHa! And therefore the CPC version is very well too, because..... it's not a damn speccy port.
mostly because it is a french game to begin with, and so an atari ST port indeed.
Quote from: MacDeath on 12:45, 14 December 13
mostly because it is a french game to begin with, and so an atari ST port indeed.
Well, glad it was no Thompson port then. ;)
First played Captain Blood on the CPC, and was blown away. When I got my ST I got it on it too, and was promptly blown away anew.
QuoteWell, glad it was no Thompson port then.
Sapiens was a Thomson TO7/MO5 port.
5th Axis too. ;)
To be fair, if the TO8 had an AY soundchip it would really be an 8 bit Atari ST...
CPU : 6809 (1mhz though, almost equivalent to a 4mhz Z80...somewhat... can run OS-9 and still a great CPU)
RAM : 256K
Video Modes : same as CPC but 4096 palette...
just its sound is a simple beeper... ouch...
BTW go for the STe, it has much more unexploited potential.
But overall ST is inferior to Amiga as ST wasn't meant to do games but serious bizness... badass MIDI machine, and great work environment.
Yeah, it's strange that the ST got this reputation as the de-facto MIDI machine. I remember buying a MIDI adapter for my Amiga for about £5 back in the day. Thanks to the custom chips, the Amiga serial port was easily able to do 31250 baud unlike the serial port on almost every other computer, so the MIDI adapter was just a line driver and an opto-isolator for the input.
I guess they figured the low end machines would be just used to games and the high end ones would have more use for a serial port than a MIDI port, but it's strange there was never an official option as it would have been so easy to have matched that feature.
Atari ST Top 100 Games Hits (past week) (http://www.atarimania.com/top-atari-atari-st-_G_S_7.html)
There are good ST games, just choose them.
20 Games That Defined the Atari ST (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hI-LGKxQuEM#)
Atari ST BEST GAMES (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yz8QToVAAxc#)
44 Atari ST games in 3 minutes (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuQlD6Xxu-o#)
As for the Amstrad, you don't go for a shitty game, you choose only the very best.
All those french games that were good on CPC are better on ST.
Games using mouse are good as well.
Dungeon master is the very best typical ST game.
Lot's of simulators too.
Not that those games aren't always better on Amiga, sometimes the Amiga version is a plain ST port, or they are simply Good on ST.
Concerning the green OS... yeah. that's a really lite version of GEM and it is bettero n PC1512 (640x200x16...yeah !)
But you can find some alternatives here and there or updated versions.
The ROMs are on socket so you may change the ROM, or use he cartridge port for some moddings...
You can change the colours used, perhaps then some little circuit bendings to édit some decent saves with GEM.
Mais get a version of OS-9 for 68000 computer too.
Nice thing with ST compaired to amiga : you can write disk on you PC with inbuilt Floppy, just like an amstrad CPC.
Saddly I found out many programms or cracked versions used specific formats and just wouldn't fit on normal format... I should check how to do that, lol... couldn't play any demo yet because of that.
Atari TOS - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_TOS)
Quote from: MacDeath on 11:41, 28 December 13
Nice thing with ST compaired to amiga : you can write disk on you PC with inbuilt Floppy, just like an amstrad CPC.
You can use PC formatted disks on the Amiga too, although people did so only for file exchange purposes because of the much lower capacity (720KB compared to 880KB - 9 sectors per track instead of 11). There are several options, Messydos was probably the most well known.
Anyway this reminds me of the badassness of my first PC.
AT286 à 8-12mhz (always 12 with turbo button...)
EGA + colour monitor
640K
3"1/2 HD (1.44megs)
5"1/4 HD (1.2 megs)
HDD 80megs
Mouse (yes it was optionnal...)
Only missing thing was a soundcard (soundblaster or even jsut an AdLib actually) and IBM not screwing the EGA from the beginning... :laugh:
Those big DMAs and HD disk drives were really top notch at the time.
STe could have used such HD floppies.. :(
Quote from: ralferoo on 15:36, 28 December 13
You can use PC formatted disks on the Amiga too, although people did so only for file exchange purposes because of the much lower capacity (720KB compared to 880KB - 9 sectors per track instead of 11). There are several options, Messydos was probably the most well known.
Well 720 KB is 82% of 880 KB. That's just a bit less. But the 880 KB format is highly unstable. All Amiga guys I know constantly complain that they have to re-write their discs after a couple of days. 3.5" discs were not made for 880 KB, and I think it was a very silly idea to use that format. With 720 KB or similar formats discs hold data for decades, my oldest one is from 1987 and still works like a charm.
Quote from: TFM on 22:47, 28 December 13
Well 720 KB is 82% of 880 KB. That's just a bit less. But the 880 KB format is highly unstable. All Amiga guys I know constantly complain that they have to re-write their discs after a couple of days. 3.5" discs were not made for 880 KB, and I think it was a very silly idea to use that format. With 720 KB or similar formats discs hold data for decades, my oldest one is from 1987 and still works like a charm.
19% less, so nothing to be sniffed at... ;)
BTW, the Amiga data density is identical to the ST data density. The only difference is that the Amiga format is track-at-once and so doesn't need all the inter-sector gaps.
I have plenty of Amiga disks from 20 years ago that read just fine. There are some read errors on some of the low quality disks, but I also see read errors on the PC formatted ones on the same media.
Sadly, those 25 years old disks are all in "not so good" shape and due to fail one day.
Thanks for the nice vids, MacDeath... even these don't cover but a tiny part of the great ST titles...
Torvak_STE.avi - YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJWLGGqJ_C8)
Atari ST Operation Thunderbolt - YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_GAVzumOVg)
Atari ST Game: Future Wars - YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFHiW-JP86Y)
StickHead's Top Ten Atari ST Games #9: Populous - YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLuU7LhsYk8)
Gods - Atari St - YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pyjew3F9nDU)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GidhMyVC0U (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GidhMyVC0U)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdHBOv-eytU (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdHBOv-eytU)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIe-ZDx3J7s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIe-ZDx3J7s)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7Rieq-Z7Zw (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7Rieq-Z7Zw)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQDb4EsaM4I (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQDb4EsaM4I)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0zd16XYaGo (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0zd16XYaGo)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FueFWpHoKtU (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FueFWpHoKtU)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvPJnaVWFEM (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvPJnaVWFEM)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3-6hYO9Xqk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3-6hYO9Xqk)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-zMI78fyvg (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-zMI78fyvg)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KUPPc2FdHY (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KUPPc2FdHY)
The more I watch about ST stuff I realize how superior the CPC is. :laugh:
I had the 520 STf in 87 after I sold my 464. Then did the same deal later with Amiga 500 in 89.
I discovered the tools and the rest of the public domain on the Atari. On the CPC only tapes, commercial games, no menu no funny crack.
In 1990 I saw Cubase/ST, so I bought Bar & pipe lite on the Amiga. Well... I got an Atari again! But a 1040 STe in 92 for few bucks. Cubase was awesome! I used my Amiga (upgraded to 1,5Mo, MIDI and sampler box) as a sampler (can't remember the tool, could be simply Protracker) since the Atari.
The colors and the sound? It's only the charm of the machine, stuff is always lovely when done tasty.
Most of the time the games were better on the Amiga, everyone know that. Often 25 FPS on the Atari, which is the main problem to me.
In 2014 the Amiga feel sometime older than Atari, I mean some musics with ST-00 pacthes... With time the YM feel more and more awesome :) Chiptune!!
Also, it's true that there are games on ST that are better. Goldrunner, Xenon, Speedball 1...
One other thing I loved is the disk drive on Atari. On the Amiga I felt mad with "please insert in df0:" or waiting to read the directory of a disk with hundred of sounds... Nightmare, I bought a second disk drive, it changed my life :P
A last one is I tried GFA on Amiga and Atari. Totally buggy on the Amiga (but Amos was great!) and simply brilliant on the Atari. And there's this amazing GFA demo http://dhs.nu/video.php?ID=369 (http://dhs.nu/video.php?ID=369)
After all these tips and having played with it for several weeks, I'm still not convinced. It hasn't grabed my attention and it takes up too much space that I could use for other machines I'd like to have. If anyones interested in having an Atari 520ST+ (1MB) with one of my S-Video adapters and an Audio out mod added, then send me a PM offer. I have an SF354 drive and all the PSUs too.
Bryce.